Mixed Feelings

As with Sachs, my feelings about the Acumen Fund are very mixed.
No. Let me rephrase that.
I really love what the Acumen Fund is doing to truly help people in developing countries--and not just in the short run. Seth Godin's video, however, gave me some distinctly unhappy feelings.
All my life, I was brought up to believe that we in the "First World" have a duty to help those who are incapable of helping themselves. As I grew older, that mindset has stayed with me, even though many around me are rather vociferously against "handouts" and seen to be very paranoid of being taken in by scams.
Even though I am all for aiding the poor, I was elated by the logic and vision of the Acumen Fund. As the Internet site says "Traditional charity often meets immediate needs but too often fails to enable people to solve their own problems over the long term." The site describes how the Acumen Fund works to actually give people not just food or medicine (which run out in a short time), but rather helps them make a living for themselves.

While the work of the Acumen Fund impressed and inspired me very much, Seth Godin's video bothered me just a little. At the beginning of his video, he talks about the purpose of education, claiming that it is to essentially dumb people down so that they would be complacent enough to work in a factory. This I must disagree with--heartily. If one takes the time to look at history, one would discover that the reason that education was revolutionized after the Civil War was because people--mostly women--were distressed that the population of the United States was caught in a cycle of uneducation, ill health, and poverty. A movement for public education was begun and became the school system that we all know now. Seth Godin's pronunciation that education was created for the appeasement and dumbing-down of the masses really bothered me. He's basically telling a great big lie to further an agenda. Granted, it's a very noble agenda, but that doesn't make lying about the past right.
Besides my problems with Godin's views on education, however, I found his speech to be essentially a rehashing of everything that the Acumen Fund is about. And I like the Acumen Fund. It's doing really good work for the world, really smart work.